Just do it now, you won’t regret it, or install mint in a virtual machine and full screen it and get use to it, you’ll find yourself using windows less and less every day. My personal go to is Kubuntu, because I like the customization capabilities and lower memory footprint than Gnome. I hate tiling windows managers, so don’t recommend those please.
Unpopular opinion: Linux Mint sucks ass and there are so many great distros to choose from, which aren’t Linux Mint. It looks like Windows XP and functions like Windows XP. Still uses X11, which doesn’t even have proper support for 1:1 touchpad gestures and handles multiple displays with different scaling factors and refresh rates in a way that is, well, hacky and janky at best or non-functional at worst.
I get that Linux Mint is easy to use because it’s made specifically to be as convenient as possible to users coming from Windows but jeez, it looks and feels like something from 2005, especially on a laptop…
I’ve just started to daily drive Mint, after finding Fedora confusing and Ubuntu somehow slow and stuttery.
Every few years I try out Linux desktop and this is the first time I’ve found it usable enough for me. For the first time I’m not delving into forum posts from last decade to get simple stuff working.
What distro would you recommend that does desktop usability better than Mint?
It’s s gateway drug. It’s ok to let them come in on Mint and Ubuntu, they’re scared and confused. Give them creature comforts. Once they’re warm and fuzzy, they’ll get inquisitive and branch out.
Regale to the Mint users the virtues of your better choices, but tell the windows users come on it and use whatever they’re comfortable with.
Linux Mint might look outdated but it’s stable as hell. Especially LMDE. Any time I mess around with arch/arch-based derivatives or any rolling release distros I’m quickly reminded why I chose to run Mint as my primary OS. I’m long past my distro hopping days so having something that works without question and doesn’t require any mucking around is huge for me.
I’ll take something from 2005 as a compliment to Linux Mint. Having installed it in 2006 you are absolutely correct. It’s shockingly boring lack of constant UI paradigm shifts almost makes me forget about the OS completely. I’m at the point in my Linux journey where I see slow adoption of new things as good. I accept others have setups that mint does not work for, but I would wager there is no Linux DE better suited as a first suggestion to try depending on the newness of the hardware. If you have 5 monitors of differing resolutions and frame rates then sure, there are better DEs.
I used Mint when I first started playing around with Linux about a decade ago and it was pretty good. But I recently tossed it on a laptop that I primarily just wanted to run a web browser and have minimal faffing about and I’ve been extremely impressed with how it’s matured.
The DE is snappy and unobtrusive with extremely sane defaults. The software center is extremely usable and has very nice flatpak integration, their replacement desktop utilities for the Gnome utilities they once used are very full featured and don’t get in your way, and in most cases where Canonical built their own tool that nobody else uses, Mint has already swapped it with the standard tool. If your goal is to just get a Linux desktop going with minimal faffing about Mint has really become a brilliant choice to do so with
The new windows appification and UI shit screams “we think people are straight up fuckin retarded” to me. They might as well manufacture keyboards to look like speak and spell toys
Really annoying start search that doesn’t go to the control panel programs but opens bing search instead, also the right control panel features are not linked from the new 2024 system app ui WTF
For the past 8 years I have had to disable ‘mouse acceleration’ after every Windows update. The updates have become more frequent, and the setting to disable acceleration has slowly become buried deeper in the menus. Switched to Linux two days ago and I’m never looking back.
I wish home and pro version influenced the setting panes. I get what they’re trying to do with making it look like OSX and Linux and why the “network interface and adapters” probably isn’t helpful for many home users, but I just wanna manage my interfaces here.
Yeah I’ve been a mixed environment sysadmin for many years and still to keep need a Windows desktop at home and powershell makes it all happen. I basically do a complete debloat of my install and and all that. I actually like the overall Windows 11 desktop environment but omg the bloatware is insane I don’t know how people use it without knowing how to clean it up.
Very true! Enterprise iso and MAS and basically done. My previous builds have mostly all been Enterprise edition and I’d definitely go that route if I knew 11 was gonna be so bad. A part of me was curious after hearing so much hate, and I didn’t mind learning how to remove it all because I could see it coming in useful for helping others, it was a good way to get exposed to all of it and I found some helpful tools I can send to people now.
Because I don’t have all the commands to do everything memorized. Also powershell versions and compatibility / features have changed a lot over the years.
Not to say that Powershell is a bad thing in any way, it is quite useful for the stuff I do at work. But it is a mess just like the rest of MS.
Appwiz.cpl, ncpa.cpl, desk.cpl and mmsys.cpl. I use all the time… ever since win 8 changed all the settings ui. That new ui, while getting better since 8 still sucks since the old control panel. I hope they never remove it since windows is still the name of the game for end users (even in some software dev environments).
As I’ve heard this explained, enterprise admins have scripts, and to a less important extent muscle memory, tied to Control Panel layout and command lines, and that’s not a group you want to irritate.
That is only maintained due to the new operating system being a new shell placed on top of the countless older shells and some new small features that rely on the newest most fragile thing they added with the shell
I heard some call it the “painting over rust” method, and they’re maintaining the most used and by some organisations the most relied on operating system in the world
I thought this was intentional? They have control panel stuff somewhat similar to the old style, but build a settings app for the less technical people so they can find common stuff without getting overwhelmed?
It is intentional but not like that, Windows is built on backwards compatibility. That’s why so many parts of current Windows versions have seemingly parts of old versions tacked onto them.
I’ve got fed up of them changing how many hoops you go through to get to the old settings so I have the .cpl commands memorized that work no matter what computer you’re at
So fucking annoyed at the taskbar overflow shit in Windows now. I don’t want it hiding any of my system tray icons…I want to see what’s running and I don’t care how it looks. Every time certain apps update themselves, I have to go in again and select that particular app to hide itself with no way to tell Windows to just stop trying to hide system tray icons altogether. I’ve told it to hide Discord and the Xbox app probably 20 times each now and it conveniently forgets my decision every app update.
Add comment